[Juha Vauhkonen]

Yes, you can chain-link many firewire drives in to one Firewire port. I have an iMac with 2 firewire ports, and I have 3 drives connected to them at the moment.

You can even chain link two drives together with 400 and 800 Mbit data ports, but then you operate with lower speed rate, unless you keep the order so, that faster drives (800) are first, then last are the slower 400 drives. No bottle neck so to speak.

[Juha Vauhkonen]

If it was shot on Canon XL-1, I don’t think that cam shot DVCAM? It was just DV as I can remember…

Anyway, for DVCAM tapes be sure to use a deck or camera that can read DVCAM, then using FCP capture preset for PAL/DV should work normally.

[Juha Vauhkonen]

I’ve seen some videos on the Net that had some few second missed offline clips and the FCP media offline warning:)

[Juha Vauhkonen]

Hi.

Be sure to monitor your actual footage from an external professional broadcast CRT monitor.

Your tiny FCP windows are not the ones you want to judge the actual video quality. You can also view the noise (or grain) issue on full HD second computer monitor (should be quality one too) with FCP External view. Be sure to view at 100% with no scaling.
Again, this is a secondary option with computer monitors. Best is to judge with good video card / output -> professional video monitor, or calibrated expensive flat screen.

There are different settings in the FCP timeline options (full, dynamic and so on.). Be sure to view and render the timeline video in full quality. Also keep the timeline compression setting the same as the footage.

In my experience Panasonics (DVX and HVX) tend to render “softer” video than the other manufacturers’ cams. Some noise is there too.
So if you mean more sharp HD video quality by “crispy”, then sure I bet JVC renders crispier video. That’s the one thing people who use Panasonics cams like, is the “not-so-video-clean” images it produces.

If you shoot in progressive mode, it eats up light from the sensor, so dark scenes should be well lit, then make the footage darker in the post. Especially with DVX or HVX it’s important to avoid shooting in the dark, since noise becomes evident. NO gain, unless it’s part of the style.

I don’t know about your work flow or the codecs you work with, but here’s a cool cheap FCP plugin program that saved me and my footage, literally shot in near dark with DVX.

Neat video:

https://www.neatvideo.com/

It costs about a hundred bucks, but it’s worth every cent. It removes unwanted and even excessive grain (or noise) from video, AND it has a neat sharpen tool that can bring snap to otherwise soft Panasonic footage. With my DVX wide angle shots, it made the footage twice as sharp as the originals, without the typical artifacts caused by most sharpen filters. The noise removal is unbelievable in this price range.

[Juha Vauhkonen]

Hey, is this with Prores compression only, that you should render the timeline as Prores first before exporting? What about Uncompressed formats?

I don’t understand what’s the point that one has to render the timeline to Prores before exporting, unless you want to check the final quality before export?

I thought the point of all those dozens of compression settings in the export window was to free FCP user from hassle to create extra timelines for different compressions…?

[Juha Vauhkonen]

That lens should be in the standard 16:9 (1.78:1) anamorphic ratio.

Like you said, the problem is that QT doesn’t know it’s anamorphic video since there is no flag in the signal, so you have to convert it “manually” so to speak.
I don’t know about QT pro, but in FCP / FCE you can squeeze it to 16:9 by turning the timeline’s anamorphic mark on, OR, in the clip’s motion tab (in FCP that is) using the distort parameter. The correct number % is 33.33 for 16:9.

If you don’t have access to FCP or FCE, you should be able to do the conversion in MPEG streamclip too. There’s a preview in that program that is very handy.

I don’t know if iDVD or DVD SP are smart enough to do the correction. If there’s a preview, you can see if it does by turning on the 16:9 aspect ratio.

[Juha Vauhkonen]

I think this is a general problem with computers and developing software.
The better and faster chips get, computing simple test patterns is always faster and faster in the lab, but there’s always heavier programs waiting in line, so the overall work speed stays the same in the real world.

With video these days there’s also HD that demands huge power, so editing programs in HD is now as slow as DV was years ago. Geesh, in the future, how about 2k or 4k editing? Fast and cheap of course… Something tells me that editors’ job will be waiting and render hell still years and years to come.

Of course fast drives are the most crucial thing for speed. Let’s face it: many of us are editing using cheap and “fast” firewire drives, and then wonder how play back can be sluggish? There might be a reason they’re cheap drives… I remember with really old Macs using Avid and SCSI drive-arrays editing was sometimes almost smoother than with some modern programs!!!

I don’t know about FCP’s code, there might be a thing or two that slow the overall speed.
For instance, it would be cool if FCP could use some of the extra processors to do background rendering while editing, like the motion analysis option does now, or like in Compressor the processor instances are user selectable.

[Juha Vauhkonen]

I wasn’t sure if you mean field flicker, or that the whole top black area in widescreen mode is flickering?

Do you have a third-party slow mo plug-in filter in the flickering clips?

Some of them do cause flickering because they work their magic thru some field doubling techniques etc. If so, you need to apply FCP’s shift fields effect before the slow mo effect (at least that I can remember, the right order that is…). If you put them in wrong order, result might be really stuttering video, so you need to switch the order.

Also, vignetting effects can cause strange flickering with some plug-in slow motion effects. You need to put vignettes or other effects after the slow-mo effects, not before them.

What you’re describing is typical field related problem, that could come from badly executed effects. Also, old analogue video tapes (when digitized), might have some field flickering, I think…

If nothing else works (for some reason), you can set the picture scale to 101 in the Basic motion tab, so it zooms in 1%. This does degrade normal DV-size video a little, but it’s hardly noticeable I think. With HD formats that get converted down to 720 or SD, you can’t tell at all if few scan lines are missing from the top and bottom.

If you do not want to degrade the quality, you can always mask the video with a widescreen matte, and set the parameters so, that it just covers the flickering part, usually just one line is enough.